Fundamental Limitation on the Detectability of Entanglement

Entanglement detection is essential in quantum information science and quantum many-body physics. It has been proved that entanglement exists almost surely for a random quantum state, while the realizations of effective entanglement criteria usually consume exponential resources, and efficient criteria often perform poorly without prior knowledge. This fact implies a fundamental limitation might exist in the detectability of entanglement. In this work, we formalize this limitation as a fundamental trade-off between the efficiency and effectiveness of entanglement criteria via a systematic method to theoretically evaluate the detection capability of entanglement criteria. For a system coupled to an environment, we prove that any entanglement criterion needs exponentially many observables to detect the entanglement effectively when restricted to single-copy operations. Otherwise, the detection capability of the criterion will decay double-exponentially. Furthermore, if multi-copy joint measurements are allowed, the effectiveness of entanglement detection can be exponentially improved, which implies a quantum advantage in entanglement detection problems.